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Tuesday 21 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Lynch, David
(1946-2025) US actor, artist and musician and primarily filmmaker whose work extended Surrealism into mainstream Cinema and Television. Lynch's films tend to examine the uneasy truce between rationality and the unconscious mind by revealing how intimations of Sex, Identity and death make themselves felt in modern American communities. The term Lynchian was defined by David Foster ...
Smaill, Anna
(1979- ) New Zealand author whose first novel, The Chimes (2015), artfully conceals its distant Near Future setting in a London which may be viewed as a Dystopia, as it is oppressively guild-dominated and under something like a curse, which may be nothing more than the effects of twenty-first century global despoliation. At the same time, however, a detailed and subtle ...
Cohen, Jack
(1933-2019) UK reproductive biologist, formerly with the University of Warwick, and author of several nonfiction books in which the relationship between speculative fiction and the speculative sciences are explored, all written in collaboration with Ian Stewart. The first of these is The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994). Of particular sf interest is the their exploration of possible ...
Ziemann, Hans-Heinrich
(1944- ) German author known outside his native land primarily for being the partner of actor Rita Tushingham (1942- ); of sf interest is Explosion im Atomkraftwerk (1976; trans Joachim Neugroschel as Explosion 1978; rev vt as The Accident 1979), a Near Future tale describing the Disaster of a vast and at least ...
Watson, Patrick
(1929-2022) Canadian television and radio broadcaster, director and author, active (initially as a child actor on radio) from 1943; his current affairs programme for television, This Hour Has Seven Days (1964-1966), proved too Satirical for the Canadian authorities of that time, and was cancelled for lèse majesté. The resulting scandal intensified the desire of at least one science fiction encyclopedia editor to emigrate. Of his ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...